Yo, Adrienne
By SALA ELISE PATTERSON:
It happens all the time. A beautiful young woman decides she wants to become a model and asks a photographer friend to take some head shots. Seventy years ago this ordinary series of events took an unlikely turn. That was because the beautiful woman was black; the photographer was her lover Man Ray; and one of the photographs landed in the September 1937 issue of Harper???s Bazaar, making her the first black model to appear in a major fashion magazine.
The story begins in Paris around 1936, when a young dancer from Guadeloupe named Adrienne Fidelin met Man Ray.